This is the first of two posts about a Bitcoin vending machine I built while interning at NetBurner. Part 2 is more technical.

Bitcoin is cool. It's also kind of absurd - based on impossibly complex cryptography and hyped by libertarians and Reddit anarcho-capitalists,
the technology seems destined either to radically change our concepts of value and trust or to languish as a "magic internet currency" for nerds and drug dealers.